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5 - Hearing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2012

Terry R. J. Bossomaier
Affiliation:
Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
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Summary

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Vision is the sense with the greatest bandwidth, but our sense of hearing provides distinctive, equally vital information. Apart from communication through speech, tone voice conveys a full gamut of emotions. Moreover sound, with quite different properties to light, carries quite different environmental information, and is less directional than vision.

Human hearing is good, but by no means the most sensitive within the animal kingdom, or that with the greatest frequency range. But again, animals get very close to the limits imposed by physics. As computing power and miniaturisation have grown dramatically in the last decade, knowledge of hearing has become essential to determining the standards for the capture and storage of audio information from telephone conversations to games. In 2010 the directional information from sound is still not very well captured and utilised in artificial systems. Chapter 7 covers the processing of directional information.

Having got the theoretical building blocks behind us, sound is a good place to start in the study of the senses themselves. It embodies all the ideas of the chapters on information theory and Fourier Analysis, but, being one-dimensional, is somewhat simpler than vision. Moreover, the idea of frequency in sound is commonplace, and thus easier to discuss, whereas spatial frequency in vision is a less everyday concept.

But whereas the theoretical framework of Fourier Analysis is pivotal to understanding vision and hearing, the sonic transduction elements have a great deal in common with touch and we shall come back to them in Chapter 10. In fact these transduction elements are some of the oldest in evolution.

Type
Chapter
Information
Introduction to the Senses
From Biology to Computer Science
, pp. 92 - 123
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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  • Hearing
  • Terry R. J. Bossomaier, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
  • Book: Introduction to the Senses
  • Online publication: 05 July 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139016001.006
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  • Hearing
  • Terry R. J. Bossomaier, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
  • Book: Introduction to the Senses
  • Online publication: 05 July 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139016001.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Hearing
  • Terry R. J. Bossomaier, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
  • Book: Introduction to the Senses
  • Online publication: 05 July 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139016001.006
Available formats
×